Meet Catalina Lauf — dubbed GOP’s ‘anti-AOC’

Democratic Illinois Rep. Lauren Underwood’s chances of winning reelection in 2020 may have just dropped considerably thanks to a new contender who happens to be a minority just like her.

A self-described “lifelong conservative” who’s been dubbed the “anti-AOC” by some, 26-year-old Catalina Lauf hopes to earn a seat in Congress next year because she’s tired of the “angry voices who seek to divide us.”

Thank you all so much for your love and support! Completely moved by the positive comments & words of encouragement from all the fellow patriots! Reading them all. This is only the beginning. We’re taking our country back in 2020 #IL14#OurFutureOurFighthttps://t.co/zBUrHxdGXP

“I think people like AOC and that group are focusing on an agenda that is so detrimental to our country,” she said this week to the New York Post. “They are not being leaders. They are part of the problem.”

Both AOC and Underwood are freshmen Democrats whose brief tenure in office has been filled with endless controversy, in part because of their glaring radicalism and divisive rhetoric.

In AOC’s case, she’s the same congresswoman who, one, accused a noted conservative commentator of “cat-calling” her when he challenged her to a debate, and two, lectured a group of military veterans earlier this summer about how much America allegedly sucks.

And in Underwood’s case, she’s the same congresswoman who smeared the Trump administration back in May by accusing it of “intentionally” killing illegal alien children.

“I’m a product of the American dream,” she says in the video. “My father is a small business owner who worked hard all of his life providing for his family. My mother is a legal immigrant from Guatemala who worked hard to escape poverty, corruption and war to find freedom and opportunity here in the United States of America.”

“Together, they built their American dream here in the heartland of Illinois. They taught my sister and me the values of hard work, liberty and to have an unapologetic love for our country. I’ve gone from working at a startup to working for President Donald Trump to coming back to the heartland to work for our future.”

“Today, angry voices seek to divide us by skin color, economic class and where we come from. They use envy and bitterness trying to convince us to surrender our personal freedoms for the false promises of socialism. Our own representative in congress calls Republicans racist and sexist. They forget that America is an idea, an idea that we are all created equal, and that what we have in common is far more powerful than any of our differences. They forget what makes America great is all of us coming together.”

According to a biography of Lauf on her campaign website, she graduated from McHenry County College with an associate’s degree at the age of just 17, completed her bachelor’s degree at Miami University of Ohio and then worked in both “the non-profit space and the private sector.”

Years later in 2018, she joined the Trump administration as an adviser at the Department of Commerce. The following year, she left to grow her father’s business.

“In 2019, thanks to President Trump’s Tax Cuts and Job’s Act, Catalina left the Administration to help her father grow his business, focusing on a new product launch and leading the company’s sales and distribution initiatives,” her biography reads.

But somewhere between the start of the year and now, Lauf decided that it was time for her to enter the political realm for herself. In explaining why, her biography speaks of the “divisive rhetoric and dangerous policies pushed by the far left.”

“Like many Americans today, Catalina is concerned with the young socialist progressive wing in Congress and their impact on the future,” it reads. “The American dream is what made Catalina’s life possible. She is running for Congress to help preserve the promise and future of the American dream for generations to come.”

Note that ever since the start of the year, AOC, Underwood and their equally radical freshmen colleagues — including Reps. Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley — have repeatedly made headlines for their outrageous stunts and radical proposals.

Not to mention their rhetoric, which Lauf has been critical of on Twitter:

What’s bogus is your excuse of using the horrific acts of a bad actor as a platform for your political agenda. That’s not leadership, that’s being an opportunist, at the expense of the people and families of those who lost their lives. YOU are why Americans distrust politicians https://t.co/kApNLOIHFP

@AOC has a very skewed understanding of capital markets… one obvious issue with her logic: company leadership has a fiduciary responsibility to shareholders, shareholders still gain from buy backs.. also WHY should Gov dictate what a company does with their money? https://t.co/g9ycdLa0AT

Progressive’s worst nightmare is when the people of this country, no matter the color of their skin, band together for Freedom. To have Government out of their way. That’s why they use race.. to keep people from coming together. Totally obvious.